A few weeks ago, my sons and I heard part of the National Public Radio
program Marketplace. One of the show's editors, Professor Jeffrey
Kaplan, was expounding on the expansion of brand-naming and brand-buying
throughout popular culture - a Bad Thing, in his opinion, opposed by "a
rag-tag band of citizen activists."

Professor Kaplan, who heads a department of media studies or some such
at a university, proceeded to proclaim several falsehoods, the most egregious
of which is that nobody has any idea what advertising does.

"Taken all together, advertising studies of reach and effectiveness
are equivocal," said Prof. Kaplan - meaning that some studies say
one thing, some say another, and therefore none of them means anything
at all. "Look at the dot.com companies who spent 97 cents of every
dollar on advertising," the Professor continued, pursuing a typical
wise-ass pseudo-syllogism. "Where are they now?"

If Professor Kaplan is what passes for a college teacher nowadays, I
find myself more and more convinced that my wife and I don't have to worry
about saving up for our sons's higher educations. We'll just march them
down to the Marine Corps recruiting office when they're 18.

Let's start with the assertion that advertising studies of reach and
effectiveness are "equivocal." That's like saying that half
of a sixth grade class gets 100 percent on math tests and half gets zero;
therefore students's math performance, "taken all together,"
is equivocal, or meaningless. Nonsense. All it means is that half the
class have learned their math facts perfectly, while half have not learned
them at all.

In the real world, of course, such results don't happen. They don't happen
in the classroom, and they don't happen in advertising.

Direct mail advertising, for one, can be measured with great precision.
A large mailing can be sent to a carefully selected audience; that mailing
is often split in half, with half the recipients getting one kind of copy
package and coupon, and half getting one slightly different. Out of the
responses - which can obviously be measured; people send back a postcard
- one half of the audience will respond better than the other half. The
better-responding mailing will be repeated, split again between one small
variable.

Do that hundreds of times, and you get a very fine idea what makes a
certain audience of people buy things.

Similarly, large commodity products, like big-brand beer, soft drinks,
and laundry detergents, have developed advertising strategies for radio,
television, magazines and other media that get measured for the effect
of certain messages and techniques over long periods of time. They know
what works. A bump in sales of a quarter of one percent in Pepsi, Budweiser,
or Tide makes a difference of millions of dollars in revenue. It's no
coincidence that large accounts like that have maintained relationships
with single ad agencies for decades at a time.

Advertising people can poke plenty of fun at themselves, because it is
not an exact science. "I know half my ad dollar gets wasted,"
runs one joke. "I just don't know which half."

The more ephemeral and distant the ad medium, the more elusive the measure
of effectiveness and reach. Direct mail and direct response yield highly
calculable results. Television advertising, while it conveys more widespread
power, can be measured much less precisely. Even less measurable is the
brand-new medium of Internet advertising. This should surprise no one.
The Internet is still shaking itself out as a medium, and its main challenge
now, as it has always been, has been figuring out how to measure its commercial
value and impact.

No, Professor Kaplan's well-practiced rap about "equivocal"
advertising results is nothing more than a decades-old academic attack
on advertising itself, one of the staples of leftist politics. Advertising,
after all, is the cutting sword of capitalism.

That wise-ass syllogism about the dot.coms spending 97 percent of every
dollar on advertising, and "Where are they now?" ought to be
followed by a pre-recordeded announcement: "Honk! Honk! Spin Alert!
Spin Alert!" Never mind the blowsy ignoring of ordinary journastic
precision. Which dollars?

Revenues? Post-tax? Corporate spending? Which dot.coms? The ones that
were selling nothing? And what does it prove, exactly, that trying to
sell nothing doesn't work?

The real danger here, Professor Kaplan, is not that some corporation
will buy the Marketplace program name. (That has already happened
all over Public Radio, as any Archer Daniels Midland shareholder can tell
you.) It is that broadcasters like Professor Kaplan will create a marketing
and branding entity known as the Markeplace Listener who is supposed to
believe in certain things.

In brand names, for example, like "rag-tag band of citizen activists."